Dragonchain ICO Review & Analysis

Summary:

Originally developed at Disney’s Seattle office under the name Disney Private Blockchain Platform, DragonChain is a commercial platform for application developers to rapidly and securely deploy Blockchain applications in a turnkey manner while fostering a community through its DragonChain Incubator and Ecosystem.

The Dragoncoin (DRGN) will be used by developers and organizations to interact with DragonChain platform products and services as a utility token and will reward organizations for running public or private nodes that secure the network and help provide consensus.

Originally being developed exclusively for Disney, the project moved into a featured open source initiative last year leading to the creation of the DragonChain Foundation. Currently the foundation manages the open source code and is helping govern the community as the platform gets off the ground.

Dragoncoin has already completed its presale raising over a million dollars and is going through its public token sale in month of October 2017. They aim to distribute close to 55% of total minted tokens with a price of each dragon (DRGN) being set by the market over that period. With a powerful set of advisors and community attention this ICO looks to have a great deal of investors contributing.

What is Dragonchain?

The Dragonchain team will launch Dragonchain, Inc., as a commercial entity to provide an array of products and services to the community. Their vision supports areas of the market that are underserved with strong demand and projected growth in the blockchain industry ($7.7b by 2024 ) 3 across an array of multi-billion dollar sectors such as Arts, Wine, Automotive, Legal, Digital Marketing, etc.

These sectors and more will experience market disruption with blockchain capabilities shifting the value proposition into decentralized environments. Dragonchain platform will support these needs.

Problem

Leveraging blockchain technology for real business initiatives is expensive and very risky in an operational environment. This can be expected to result in low success rates as creation of software without blockchain technology is already fraught with difficulty and the addition of a relatively new technology such as blockchain with features such as cryptography, Proof of work, economics, currency modeling, game theory, and custom programming languages is sure to cause more trouble for a team as the overlap of these skills is particularly rare.

Solution

Dragonchain solves this problem by allowing development and integration before the economic model is known. Monetization can be applied after a system is functioning and enough real data is available for analysis.

When Dragonchain was originally launched, the team had several goals in mind based upon past experience developing blockchain solutions:

The platform is designed for use in a wide variety of use cases and applications. It is particularly useful in non-financial systems and in monetization and modeling of micro-economies for example to replace political economies within an organization with transparent rules to incentivize productive or otherwise valued behavior.

Token Economics:

Hard cap: 433,494,437 DRAGONS (ICO is 55% of total token supply)

Conversion rate: The price will be set by the market over the period of the sale. Participants will receive Dragons equal in value to the BTC or ETH contributed.

Roadmap (Business & Technical)

2015-2016

Development of Disney Private Blockchain Platform, released as open source

2017

Launch of Dragonchain Foundation – Launch of Dragonchain, Inc.

2018

Full Platform and Incubator roll out

Strengths

As DragonChain aims to be a platform and not just a currency or a service provider, it is drastically important they build their developer community. DragonChain has committed to this by allowing developers of multiple languages such as Python, Java, JavaScript and C# to develop on the platform.

Modeling off other successful incubators DragonChain wants to not only provide turn key level blockchain for users but create a home and community to foster innovation and build out token marketplace environments. With a strong association with Disney, their incubator will connect businesses with subject matter experts, partners, and consult them on strategy / KPI’s which will allow them to get funded easier.

It’s use of a hybrid blockchain which introduces context-based verification (Proof-Of-Existence). This would allow for publicly verifiable checkpoints as projects are developed or using the DragonChain platform. If pulled off this will allow for lower development costs and higher security and scalability.

Weaknesses

Uncapped ICO that will last the whole month of October. Uncapped ICO’s are becoming less and less common in the blockchain ICO ecosystem as it brings concerns over why the need for so much funding and if the team is truly focused on building an Ecosystem or aiming for a cash grab.

No information on when Dragons will be distributed to investors wallets. It has been communicated that the Dragons will be distributed after the public sale is completed + enough time to complete an independent external audit. Additionally, there is no communication on how long will it take for the team’s tokens to vest.

No detailed Roadmap provided and its not exactly clear what is the next thing the communities are working on. Thus, there isn’t much clarity or way to judge if the project is on tract or when they will be able to deliver a working product or an example of use on a testnet.

Our Verdict:

The team behind the DragonChain Foundation is impressive and have a long experience at companies such as Disney and Lockheed Martin. Even more, they have worked on projects for the FBI and the Department of Justice in limited capacity.

The team is led by CEO and principal architect Joe Roets as well as George Sarhanis who are the spearheads of the DragonChain vision and are leading the charge for a turn key style blockchain platform such as DragonChain.

After a thorough review of the DragonChain platform, its ICO structure and the potential use cases of dragoncoins (DGC). We believe there are some potential areas for concern and it will be best to use a wait and see approach for investment.

For example, because the token sale is uncapped, it is hard to evaluate the platform and we recommend waiting till the last few days of the token sale to see the valuation of each dragoncoin and not have to assume how many dragoncoins will be sold.

In the short term, we believe that Dragoncoin will be a good short term exit as there is buzz around the platform and its connections with Disney will have most investors excited assuming they can continue to market and communicate with the community well.

DragonChain is a platform with a big vision and based on the experience of the team and the simmer of excitement from the community we believe it will be a great place for blockchain innovation and the current ICO is a start to a platform that will benefits users, developers and the global community.

In the long term outlook perspective, we do not recommend DragonChain until a few key areas of concern are addressed.

First, there would need to be additional clarity on their roadmap and what 2018 and 2019 look like from a goals and objective perspective. Without that, it is difficult to keep the team accountable and figure out when certain products will be delivered, additionally we ideally require more clarity on the vesting schedule of ‘team issued tokens’ to confirm the team will remain to the long term outlook of the project.

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About Us

We are fast becoming the authority hub for all ICO, Crypto and Blockchain news. Our mission is to help and bring accurate and transparent educational content on blockchain, crypto assets and ICO's to fellow crypto enthusiasts.